TIL
> London hit 90% literacy around 1750
Still though, if you look at today, there's plenty of people who can read, but don't. You'll find lots of modern people who don't know anything about what happened in history, what the political themes are, and so on.
But how much people had read, and how easily they could find new things, were of course vastly different. They were still busy inventing newspapers, and wikipedia was some way off.